8 Experts Weigh in on the Future of Human Spaceflight

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Planes Committee is getting ready to release its full report detailing the options for the future of manned missions into space. While the discussion over the future of NASA continues, PM turned to the leading rocketeers, astronauts and manufacturers to weigh in on the debate.

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee is nearing the end of its role in spaceflogjht history. The committee, which is commonly referred to as the Augustine Commission after its leader Norman Augustine, concluded that even NASA's current plans to return to the Moon would require significantly more funds, some $3 billion more per year, bringing the agency's annual budget to more than $20 billion. One of the most talked-about aspects of the report is its so-called Flexible Option, which provides an increase in funding to NASA, without constructing an ironclad schedule or set of destinations. As the committee's work winds down, it's now up to NASA to consider the findings, and offer specific recommendations to the Obama administration. Some of the leading experts weighed in:

Norman Augustine

Chairman of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin

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(Photograph by Paul E. Alers/NASA via Getty Images)

"I can build predications for or against almost anything in the report, unfortunately, but the flexible option offers a couple of major advantages. The most significant of which is that many of the other options basically say, Send me some billions of dollars, come back in 20 years, and you're going to see something neat. How many citizens can remain supportive, how many engineers can devote their lives, to that kind of promise? The flexible option says send me money, and I'll show you something great. Send me more in four years, and I'll show you something even better. There are significant milestones along the way. One of those milestones is circumnavigating the Moon. Yes, we did that 40 years ago. Another is to go to a Lagrange point. So what, you might say? The skeptics would discount some of these missions. But if we say that each mission is going to develop techniques to get to Mars, as opposed to an end in itself, people might be more willing to support them. And some destinations will be historic. A moon of Mars is an exciting one. Docking with an asteroid, standing on it, in some ways is almost more intriguing. These are things that don't show up very often. If one should be headed toward Earth, it might be nice to know more about them ahead of time.

"The science you can do with humans, you can do more of it, dollar for dollar, with robots. But the scientific community, by and large, are not great supporters of human spaceflight anyway. They think we oversold the scientific benefits. So I think the basic answer has to be an intangible one. In polls, a huge percent of the American people support the space program. It costs each of us around 7 cents a day. I think most people would be willing to pay that, to have a human space flight program. Human exploration tends to excite people more than robotic exploration. The latter does excite people, but nobody remembers the name of the first robot to land on moon. Everyone remembers the name of the first human. If someone had lobbed an instrument package to top of Mount Everest with some flags on it, it probably would not have generated the excitement that Hillary and Norgay did. And if we should manage to destroy our planet's environment, or discover that it's going to be impacted by a comet, it might be that you'd want humanity, some part of it, to live on another planet, to increase the odds of our survival."

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Jeff Greason

CEO and co-founder of XCOR Aerospace, member of the Augustine Commission

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(Photograph by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

"When we started work on the committee, there was this question, What do we do with ISS [International Space Station], do we go to the Moon, Mars, near-Earth objects, other interesting destinations in space? What do we do? Once you come to the realization that, in the long term, Mars is where you're trying to get, what do you do? There are people who think we're ready for the Hail Mary pass to Mars. I'm not one of them. There's a long list of technologies that need to matured and developed. Those missions are going to be very long. We'll be in deep space for a long time. It's been decades since the United States did manned plan exploration in space. Doing it again in an environment that's 20 light minutes away from Earth, where mission control is not looking over your shoulder, that will take time and practice.

"One of the findings we came to in the committee was that the ultimate rationale for why humans are indispensable in space activity, one of the driving reasons, is to learn to live there. We believe there will be future outposts of humans living elsewhere. You don't learn how to live and work in space by sending robots. I think Mars is a very obvious place for settlement to happen. It is the place we have that is closest to us and looks like the most prominent candidate for a self-sustained human presence. Why would anyone want to go there? I want to go! There are lots of people out there who want to go. Wind that question back 400 years. Why would anyone want to go this great howling wilderness in North America? When the pilgrims got here, they wrote about what inhospitable place it was, with no inns to refresh one's spirits, nothing but howling wilderness. The first three attempts to make a permanent place in the Los Angeles area ended in death. Even now, you have to pipe in water to survive. We had to master fire to get out of Africa, and agriculture to get to a lot of places. The American West had to be subjected to massive civil engineering works before more than a small community of pioneers could live there. What you consider to be habitable is a function of your level of technology."

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John Carmack

Founder of Armadillo Aerospace

(Photograph by John Carmack)

"I've never really cared for arguments about manned versus robot exploration, for the sake of science. I don't really think the purpose of a space program is science. I think the base motive is to expand human civilization into space. It's about preparing way for where people are going to be in future. Science is a tertiary benefit. People weren't excited about landing on the Moon because learned about the early geology of Earth. They were excited because we landed on the damn moon.

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"But the cost of these programs, if it's not sustainable, we're not going to move civilization into space. Things need to change. It's saddening looking at the amount going into NASA, $14 billion in a year, and the sense that it's poorly utilized. I'm a little fatalistic about NASA going off and delivering all the wonder things that we want to happen. They've shown than you can spend tons, and sometimes get it right the first time, but that's not the most efficient way to make progress. We want to see progress into getting into space, incrementally. One of our major goals was to set [Armadillo] up like doing computer software. You compile 20 times a day. You take a stab, debug what went wrong, and carry on.

"If people want to get people into space, don't vote for increasing NASA's budget. Support people actually building rockets. I'd bet that the next manned landing on the Moon is going to be a private venture. I won't be surprised if 30 years go by and NASA hasn't put another man on the Moon. I'll bet the next person is going to be part of a project of some billionaire that says, I want it done. And he makes it happen."

Buzz Aldrin

Apollo 11 astronaut

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(Photograph by Platon)

"The destination is Mars, without distractions, like exploratory landings on the Moon. I'm not talking about skipping [the Moon], but using our leadership to assist the internationals, like China and India, in their own manned landings, both before their missions, and once they've landed, with robots. We should establish an international lunar economic development authority. Our goal should be to develop the Moon, not explore it--we've already done that. We should conserve our resources.

"With its flexible option, the Augustine Commission is suggesting taking a position that doesn't strongly commit us, and leaves us open to revise things: Maybe we'll land on the Moon, maybe we won't land on Mars. That may be nice and noble, but it forgets the option that should be very attractive to a national leader, whose short-term advisers might be anxious about the costs, but they aren't going to go down in history anyway. If President Obama selects a monumental, historic commitment, to use these other missions as stepping stones toward the permanent settlement of Mars, that plan doesn't even become expensive until it's reaffirmed in 10 years, at the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing. Hopefully the world financial situation will allow that to happen. We have to assume it will be better and chart the course. All he can do is set the whole thing in motion. This administration needs a clearly laid out plan, that does not cost lots of money, so they don't rush into something that excludes Mars. What is underway right now costs too much, and doesn't get us there."

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Scott Pace

Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, former Associate Administrator for Program Analysis and Evaluation at NASA

(Photograph by George Washington University)

"There are two related questions posed by human exploration. First, is there anything economically useful to do out there, that pays your way? And second, can you live off the land, and use local resources to survive, or will we always be tied to support from earth? If the answer to both is yes, then you get space colonies, self-sustainable life off-planet. If the answer to both is no, then space is like Mt. Everest. Tourists might go to Mt. Everest, sherpas might make a living off of it, but no one really lives there.

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"If the answer is that you can live off the land, but it's not economically useful, it's like Antarctica. It was 40 years between the last time we were there, when Shackleton reached Antarctica, and when the U.S. Navy went back in 1912. There's a similar lapse between going to the Moon the first time and, hopefully, when we'll return. In that case, you can form an outpost and live there, but you're sustained by constant funding, since engineering doesn't pay for itself. If the answer is that there are economically useful things to do, such as mining Helium-3 on the Moon, but we're always reliant on Earth for basic necessities, then space becomes a North Sea oil platform. You can make money there, but it will always be a hostile environment.

These are four very radically different human futures. And they're all part of a larger question: Is there a human future beyond Earth? It's a question ranks up there with whether there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We can search for life with probes and telescopes, but to determine the living range of humanity, we're going to have to send humans into space."

Steven Squyres

Principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission

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(Photograph by Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)

From Squyres' testimony to the Augustine Commission on August 5, 2009:

"Humans have an extraordinary ability to function in complex environments, to improvise, and to respond quickly to new discoveries. Robots, in contrast, do best when the environment is simple and well understood, and the scientific tasks are well defined in advance. There are also lessons to be learned from the missions of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. One is that rovers like these accomplish their tasks far more slowly than humans in the same environment would. What Spirit and Opportunity typically achieve in a day, a human explorer could do in less than a minute. The Opportunity rover has traversed about 17 km in its five and a half year lifetime; this is less than the distance covered by two astronauts in their Lunar Roving Vehicle in a single EVA on Apollo 17. "

Martin Rees

Astronomer Royal, Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, and President of the Royal Society

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(Photograph by David Levenson/Getty Images)

"The particular case for sending people into space is getting weaker all the time, because of advances in robotics and miniaturization. I hope, as a human endeavor and human adventure, that people do one day go to Mars. It would be sad if manned spaceflight never reached that point. If I were an American, I'd be cautious about supporting a big, federal program to go there. The problem with a NASA-type program, is that because of political and public pressure, they have to be very risk averse. Look at the Shuttle program. There have been two major accidents, and each of those failures was a national trauma.

A manned mission [to Mars] has to be done in a mode that accepts risks. That's why the future of manned spaceflight lies in waiting till it can be done by private enterprise, or through private sponsorship. It will mean high risks, even one-way tickets. If it's done privatley, it will be like Everest. People are taking risks every day when they climb Everest, and the public accepts that. Over a two years ago, three people were killed by an abortive rocket launch in California. It didn't even make the first page in the American press. That's because it was a private space firm [Burt Ratan's Scaled Composites, makers of SpaceShipOne, which has since been fined]. If NASA killed three people, it would be headline news. Look at Steve Fosset. He died in an unspectacular way. But if he had died during a historic mission, we would have said, That's way he wanted to go. That could be true of of the first people who try to get to Mars. The point is, I can't see a NASA program adopting that mentality."

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Bob Park

Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, former Executive Director of the American Physical Society

(Photograph by Carole Cuaresma)

"If there is a useful thing for humans to do in space, I'd be happy to do it. What they're planning on doing is absolutely the wrong thing to do. They're talking about sending human beings to Mars, at a time when we're talking about finding life on Mars. If we get there, we'll have to stay there for 18 months before attempting a return flight. Do you realize the amount of feces produced by a single human being in a year and a half? All of that will be absolutely crawling with living organisms. There's no chance of keeping from contaminating mars in 18 months. We'll find Mars, but it'll be pretty familiar.

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"The idea of being pioneers is kind of funny. Anyone who thinks they can survive on Mars without constant support from Earth is kidding themselves. So what are we practicing for, by going back to Moon? When we established colonies [on Earth], we did it for very specific reasons. To rape the resources and bring them home. There aren't any resources on Mars, not that we know of. There's nothing to go there to get. If there were diamonds a feet deep on Mars, it still wouldn't be worth the cost of sending people there. We're already doing a great job with unmanned explorers. My god, we're on Saturn, and Saturn's moons. We're doing a fantastic job on Mars. There's no reason to send humans. We're better off spending our time trying to protect the Earth. We need to be building more and better telescopes to track near-Earth objects that could be headed our way. The laws of celestial mechanics are sufficiently rigid that once we detect them, we can prepare for them. Our technology is advanced enough now to let us protect ourselves. And if that happens, we're not going to send up somebody to do it. That will be an unmanned mission, too."

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